The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

These two women live with Howard and his mother during Howard's boyhood; they run the house, rigidly control Howard's life, and patronize his mother.

Howard's mother, Sophia, was a sickly woman and highly overprotective of her son. Howard's aunts ran the house, patronizing Sophia and keeping Howard under control; Sophia herself is also very controlling of her son. On those occasions when she allowed him to go barefoot outside, for example, "I would know that for every grain of dust which pleasured my feet, she would pay with a second of her life" (790).

These are the "preachers" and the "Jesus shouters" in "Beyond" whom Mothershed rails against; he blames them for the fact that he found himself in Beyond after committing suicide (786).

A self-proclaimed nihilist in life, Mothershed has committed suicide. Of him the Judge says, "for the last fifteen years my one intellectual companion has been a rabid atheist, almost an illiterate, who not only scorns all logic and science, but who has a distinct body odor as well" (789). The Judge's characterization of Mothershed is odd, since they spent their afternoons discussing thinkers like Ingersoll, Voltaire, and Paine (786, 787). Mothershed himself seems very angry at his presence in Beyond, glaring and cursing by turn, and in his clothing he carries "a heavy pistol" (786).

The Judge's wife is rather a shadowy character; the only things we know about her are that the Judge was twenty-eight when they married and she bore a son in 1903.

This is the child who "ran into the road," forcing the "young man" whom the Judge meets in Beyond to swerve his car; as he tells the Judge, he missed the child but died himself (784).

This young lady was to marry the "young man" whom the Judge meets in Beyond when, on the morning of the wedding, he was killed in a car accident (783).

This young man is the first to speak with the Judge in Beyond (and in "Beyond"). He died in a car accident when, late for his wedding, he was "driving fast" and "had to turn" when a "child ran into the road" (784). He "watches the entrance" to Beyond "with a strained, patient air," "expecting" sometime to be re-united with the woman he was going to marry (783).

When the Judge enters and again when he leaves Beyond, he encounters a "throng" of people "clotting" through the "narrow entrance" to the place (783, 795). He doesn't like crowds, so the fact that he is in one is "definitely unpleasant," "quite unpleasant" (783, 795). However, in both instances the crowd itself seems quite orderly and calm.

Jake mows the Judge's lawn and during the Judge's life leaves a flower "in its season, . . . fresh and recent and unblemished, on the morning coffee tray" (783) for the Judge's lapel.